Spam is the mass mailing of commercial, political, and other advertisements or other types of messages (information) to persons who did not express a desire to receive them.
What Should You Know About Online Spam?
Spam is used for advertising. Usually, some product or service is advertised, sometimes for winding counters on the site, less often for sending all sorts of viruses. But there is a common goal – to bring your information to the maximum possible number of addresses at the lowest cost. Moreover, the authors are not interested in the composition of the audience, the main thing is the number.
All Internet users faced with spam internet know how to answer the following questions: what it is, the purpose of spam, its symptoms, and most importantly – the consequences. The share of spam in global mail traffic is about 83%. The basic goals of spam are:
- Advertising of goods and services. Spam of this kind praises some real product or service and indicates links to a site where you can learn more about and purchase the product, or a phone number by which you can make an order.
- Website promotion. The information can be varied. Basically, something very good and/or free is being advertised. The link leads to a site that has absolutely nothing to do with this information. But the site’s ranking rises at the expense of deceived visitors. Sometimes the message can be completely blank, and the page with the counter opens programmatically in a new window.
- Paid calls. The product is advertised and the phone number is indicated, for the call to which the bill comes.
- Marketing research. Under the guise of a survey or order, they offer to fill out a questionnaire and send the data to the specified address.
How to Turn the Spam off?
In some cases, it is easy to disable spam – just click the “Unsubscribe from mailing list” button. The method works if you yourself have once subscribed to the source. Sometimes the subscription is issued automatically after registration on the site. If the source seems unfamiliar to you, it is better to use the following method and block it.
To avoid having to manually block each spammer (after all, there can be hundreds of sources), just follow the simple tips and tricks for protecting against spam:
- Do not publish your address and contacts in public and questionable places.
- Create a second box for unimportant messages and use it.
- Do not follow links in letters from unknown senders.
- Do not download attachments.
- Use only popular email services (they have the highest level of protection against spam).
- Create a more complex mailing address. The lighter the address, the easier it is for spam programs to generate it.
In most cases, spam is presented in the form of sending emails, but in fact, it is used wherever there is open access to the dissemination of information: social networks and media, forums, comments on sites, instant messengers, e-mails, SMS to the phone. It is carried out for the purpose of advertising certain products, disseminating information, stealing personal data, etc. This is an intrusive advertisement of something.
A spam attack is the distribution of spam messages with an increased concentration on certain sites or channels. Spam attacks are not always carried out due to the high return on the site. Sometimes they happen on someone’s malicious intent in order to harm the site and its owner.